“It will also be Phoebe’s first psychological test, to make sure that she can survive by taking another creature’s blood,” Marcus continued. “They’ll start with something small, of course—a bird or a cat.”
“Um-hmm,” I said, trying to sound approving while my stomach flipped.
“I made sure Phoebe could kill something—before.” Marcus stared into the distance. “Sometimes it’s harder to take a life when you have no choice.”
“I would have thought the opposite,” I said.
Marcus shook his head. “Oddly enough, when it’s no longer a question of sport, you can lose your nerve. Instinctive or not, it’s a selfish act to survive at some other creature’s expense.” He tapped his book against his leg, an anxious thrum.
“What are you reading?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“An old favorite.” Marcus tossed the volume to me.
Usually, the family’s cavalier attitude toward books earned them a lecture from me, but this one had obviously seen worse treatment. Something had nibbled one corner. The leather was even more stained than it had appeared at first glance, and the cover was covered with ring-shaped marks left by glasses, tankards, and cups. There were traces of gilt in the stamped decorations, and their style indicated the book had been bound sometime in the early nineteenth century. Marcus had read the book so often that the binding had split and there were multiple repairs—one made with yellowing cellophane tape.
A cherished item like this held a specific magic, one that had nothing to do with its value or condition and everything to do with its significance. Carefully, I cracked open the tattered cover. To my surprise, the book inside was decades older than the binding suggested.
“Common Sense.” It was a foundational text of the American Revolution. I’d expected Marcus to be reading Byron, or a novel—not political philosophy.
“Were you serving in New England in 1776?” I asked, noting its date and Boston publication. Marcus had been a soldier and then a surgeon in the Continental army. That much I knew.
“No. I was still at home.” Marcus took the book from me. “I think I’ll take a walk. Thanks for the tea.”
It seemed Marcus was not in the mood for further confidences.
He disappeared down the stairs, leaving a trail of discordant threads shimmering in his wake: red and indigo tangled up with black and white. As a weaver, I could perceive the woven strands of past, present, and future that bound the universe together. Normally the clear tones of blue and amber that made up the sturdy warp were visible, and the colored threads of individual experience provided bright, intermittent notes in the weft.
Not today. Marcus’s memories were so powerful, and so distressing to him, that they were distorting the fabric of time, creating holes in its structure to make way for some forgotten monster to emerge from the past.
The gathering clouds on the horizon and the pricking in my thumbs warned me that stormy times lay ahead. For all of us.
4
One
13 MAY
Phoebe sat before the locked windows in her bedroom with the plum-colored drapes fully open to the view of Paris, satiated with her maker’s blood, devouring the city with her eyes, hungering only for the next revelation afforded by her new sense of sight.
The night, she discovered, was not simply black but a thousand shades and textures of darkness, some gossamer, others velvet, ranging from the deepest purples and blues to the palest of grays.
Life would not always be so easy. Now there was a knock on the door before the gnawing had a chance to start eating away at her belly. Phoebe would have to feel her hunger eventually so that she could understand what it was to covet the lifeblood of a creature and manage her urge to take it.
Her only urge now, however, was to paint. Phoebe hadn’t done so for years, not since a casual remark from a teacher—cutting, dismissive—had sent her into the historical study of art rather than its practice. Her fingers itched to pick up a brush and dip it into thick oil paint or delicate watercolor pigments and apply them to canvas or paper.
Could she capture the precise color of the tiled roof across the garden—blue-gray touched with silver? Was it possible to convey the inky blackness of the sky high above, and its sharp metallic gleam at the horizon?
Phoebe understood now why Matthew’s great-grandson, Jack, covered any surface he could with chiaroscuro renderings of his memories and experiences. The play of light and shadow was endless, a game that you could watch for hours without ever feeling bored.